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Rh this feeling from any branch of Eastern Christianity. The fact that their rulers have never been Christian has saved them, at a terrible cost to themselves, from becoming a mere State Church of Byzantine pattern; but the fact remains that every variety of Christian Church in the Ottoman Empire (which is in this, as in much else, the heir of the Sassanid) is State established and State controlled, and that its officers, up to the date of writing, are partially State paid. It was, of course, out of policy (and admirable policy too, from their point of view) that Mahommedan rulers allowed this to continue; but the proceeding absolutely coincided with popular feeling, and it will be long before the theory that connection between Church and State is necessarily iniquitous finds acceptance in the East.

Mons. Labourt (Christianisme dans la Perse, p. 86) doubts the existence of both these Catholici, on the double ground that (a) Elia of Damascus, whose list of the Catholici is older than any other, places both before, not after, Papa (Ass., ii. 391); and that (b) the Council of Dad-Ishu—or to be accurate, a speaker in it—speaks of a vacancy of twenty-two years before Isaac's election. The list given by Elia, however, is purely traditional, and very incorrect in other ways. The speaker in the council (Agapetus of B. Lapat, Chabot, Synod. Or., 48, 292) certainly uses language suggesting that the vacancy of twenty-two years in the Catholicate (which admittedly came somewhere) was immediately before Isaac's election; but it also could mean that such vacancy was simply "before Isaac."

If however there was no holder of the office after the death of Bar b'ash-min till Yezdegerd gave leave for an election, the vacancy was not for twenty-two but for fortyseven years at least; and this does not agree with other information. Hence the explanation that gives least difficulty is, that Tamuza and Qaiuma were real characters, and Bishops of Seleucia during the period 380–408. It is quite probable, as Labourt suggests, that the authority of neither